Thursday, June 21, 2007

A time to sow, a time to reap, a time to kick ass

William Rivers Pitt

There is something happening today in America. With the right kind of ears, you can hear it in the sound of millions of brows slowly furrowing in anger and disgust. It feels like those tense moments just before the eruption of a summer thunderstorm, those moments when the air is electric, the ozone reek of spent lightning fills the world, and you know something very loud is about to happen.

What is happening, what can be heard and smelled and sensed all across the land, is the cresting wave of rage, betrayal and fury that is, finally, roaring across the shores of our collective American heart. After more than six years of lies, theft, graft, corruption, manipulation and misconduct, just about every living person within these borders finds themselves today gripped by the slow seethe, directed inward as much as outward, of one who has come around to see just how much of a fool they've been played for.

Americans are realizing that their faith and trust in the workings of the republic have been deliberately undermined, and the simple ability to feel good about their nation has been stolen away. Faith in the constructs of our democracy has turned to gall for the citizen who perceives now the magnitude of this theft. When joined in this by another citizen and another and another again, when the unrest of the one becomes a massed and overwhelming majority, those responsible should rightly tremble before the looming possibilities of what may come to be unleashed.

That is the missing thing people have come to sense, the stolen thing which summons the storm. Partisan sensibilities and the your-team/my-team nonsense of modern politics is being replaced by the broad belief that we have all been screwed, that what is most important has been discarded by those in power. The poll numbers charting low approval for Bush and the GOP are matched by similarly low numbers approving of the new Democratic majority in congress. The former bears most of the responsibility for what has happened, as far as the citizenry is concerned, but the latter's failure to stop or reverse the trend is equally shameful.

The seeds of this Becoming have been planted, and have grown, and the time has come to reap.

Reap, shit. The time has come to burn the Repug fields and cleanse them for generations to come.

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